


wishing ghosts to rise (DVD-style commentary)

by coloredink



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fusion, Canon-Typical Violence, Commentary, Crossover, M/M, Murder Family, Post-Episode: s02e13 Mizumono
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-15
Updated: 2014-07-15
Packaged: 2018-02-09 00:54:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,490
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1962795
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“He promised. That he wouldn’t lie, and that he wouldn’t manipulate me, and that he wouldn’t kill anymore.”</p><p>“You realize he might have been lying and manipulating you when he made that promise,” Alana points out. “You know what he is.”</p><p>(Now with author's commentary.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	wishing ghosts to rise (DVD-style commentary)

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [wishing ghosts to rise](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1915653) by [coloredink](https://archiveofourown.org/users/coloredink/pseuds/coloredink). 



**I’m always a little mixed about uploading these. On the one hand, it seems kind of narcissistic to assume that people are interested in reading about the mundane things I think about while I’m writing. On the other hand, well, _I_ find this sort of thing interesting to read, so maybe someone else does.**

**I’m not a terribly innovative writer, ideas-wise, and also Bryan Fuller actually took all my good ideas, so I went looking on the kinkmeme for someone else’s. I saw this one and liked it immediately, but didn’t think I would actually write it because it was clearly a gigantic story and I wanted to write something short. But it dug into my brain and wouldn’t let go, and fortunately it did not turn out to be the 40K monstrosity I was afraid it’d be.**

Will can hear the dogs before he even opens the door, tags jingling, noses snuffling, claws clicking against the floor. Hannibal is there too, the dogs bumping up against his legs as he takes Will’s coat and hangs it in the closet, so that Will can kneel and greet his pack. Left to his own devices, Will would leave the coat on and get dog hair all over it, which is why Hannibal does it. Hannibal is wearing his usual kitchen apparel: a dark blue button-down, with the sleeves rolled up to below the elbow, and a long white apron.

“Your timing is good,” Hannibal says. “Dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes. Poached rabbit, with polenta and braised field greens.”

“It’s my rabbit.” Abigail appears in the hallway behind Hannibal, smiling with shy pride. She’s wearing an apron too; hers is midnight blue. “I caught them.”

**I knew immediately that I wanted to start _in medias res_ , which is to say, in the dream. No background, no sad pining Will buying a PASIV from someone in a dark alley: I wanted immediately to present this very normal, and yet also very weird world that Will and Hannibal and Abigail apparently live in as a happy non-murder family.**

“Great,” says Will. He isn’t hungry yet, but he will be.

“She is an excellent hunter.” Hannibal holds up one finger. “Excuse me.” He disappears back into the kitchen. Will trails after him. Hannibal does not look up as he attends to the business of lifting lids, stirring things, adjusting the many knobs and dials on the stove. This kitchen now is smaller than the one Hannibal had in Baltimore, but everything in it is according to Hannibal’s design: stainless steel appliances; granite counters; cherry wood cupboards; a kitchen island in the center for extra prep space, raised on one side for a breakfast bar. Abigail takes off her apron and hangs it on a peg on the wall, takes silverware and napkins from a drawer and carries them to the dining room. Will retrieves the dogs’ food from the fridge: one bag of ground beef heart mixed with roasted diced root vegetables, and another of raw chicken necks.

**I complained incessantly to anyone who would listen that Will has too many fucking dogs. I had to name them, and in every scene I had to know where they were and what they were doing, and I had to make sure they were adequately walked. I had to go back and write them in more times than I can count. It was almost as annoying as having actual dogs.**

The dogs are fed in the dining room; they are not allowed in the kitchen. Each dog receives a large or small scoop of the ground heart mixture (depending on their size) and a chicken neck (save for Buster, who has a tendency to bolt his food and develop blockages). Afterward, Will returns the bags to the refrigerator and washes his hands. Hannibal is plating the food by now.

Abigail has set the table and decanted a bottle of wine. Hannibal insists on cloth napkins and full place settings even for family dinners. (Will would have been happy with melamine plates and coffee mugs, but this is an area in which he has learned to compromise, in the way that Hannibal has compromised about the dogs.) She lights the candles as Hannibal carries in their dishes from the kitchen, one in each hand and a third on one arm, between his elbow and his wrist. Will pours the wine, including one for Abigail; American laws don’t matter here, and they are at home. Only when everything is in place do they take their seats.

A generous pile of tender, shredded rabbit meat sits atop a bowlful of buttery, creamy polenta, surrounded by a crescent of dark green foliage. Will has to set his fork down to properly savor the first bite. Hannibal looks pleased, as he always does when people enjoy his food. His portion sizes are more generous now than they were at his dinner parties back in Baltimore, mostly at Will’s insistence. (“And then you act like I’m a pig when I ask for seconds. For someone whose cooking is so amazing, you’d think you’d want people to eat more of it.”) 

**My friends know me as someone who is deeply obsessed with food, a trait passed down among members of my family. In fact, if you’ve read my fics from other fandoms, you’ll notice that I have a tendency to describe what people were eating, as if I were Brian Jacques and this was a Redwall feast day. It’s something I’ve tried to tone down in recent years, but Hannibal lets me burst into FULL FLOWER.**

**This rabbit and polenta dish I actually got fromthe Buzzfeed quiz. Despite my love for food, it is another area in which I am less innovative than I’d like to be, which is why I gravitate toward traditional/classic dishes (osso bucco, coq au vin, white-cut chicken, to name three dishes from the three cuisines I cook most often). It’s the reason why I never wrote a proper Sherlock chef AU, because I was convinced that Sherlock would be a molecular gastronomist and I didn’t just want to spend an entire fic cribbing from Grant Achatz and Ferran Adria. But Hannibal is, fortunately for me, a traditional cook, even if his platings are relatively modern.**

Will doesn’t speak until he’s had a second bite. “Tell me about the rabbit, Abigail.”

Hunting rabbits is a tedious business; you take five slow, measured steps, then pause and wait for rabbits bolting for cover. Do this over and over again. It’s more difficult for Abigail, who has trouble telling which direction sounds are coming from. She missed the first one she saw and despaired of finding a second, sure that the sound of gunfire had sent them all scurrying for home. But there was a second one, and that one she bagged with a clean shot through the head, and then a third. Hannibal prepared only one; the second is in the freezer, awaiting another night. The pelts they’ll sell or give away or use to line a dog bed.

After dinner, all three of them help clean up. Though they have a dishwasher, Hannibal prefers to wash and dry the wine glasses by hand. Will doesn’t mind; it’s further opportunity for conversation, to hear about the others’ days. (His own days are always boring and hardly worth talking about.) 

**I haven’t observed if Hannibal in the TV show owns a dishwasher or not, but we do see Abigail drying wine glasses in Trou Normand, while Hannibal appears to be finishing up the dishes behind her. For whatever reason I have an easier time imagining him washing dishes by hand rather than stacking them in a dishwasher, but surely a guy who has people over for dinner so often would enjoy the convenience of not having to wash 7234234678 dishes by hand, especially since he always serves multiple courses. Then again, he appears to hire help for his large dinner parties? But anyway, this is a dream world, and Will would insist on a dishwasher.**

Once the wine glasses are lined up on a towel to finish drying and Abigail has gone upstairs to do her homework, Will takes the dogs out the back door for a good long run in the woods where earlier Abigail had hunted down their dinner. They arrive back sweaty and satisfied, the dogs’ tongues lolling. The dogs head straight for their water dishes to lap, then to the living room to sprawl on their beds. Will goes upstairs and showers. 

Hannibal is still awake, sitting up with his back against the pillows, reading something on his tablet. Will crawls under the duvet, naked, and puts his fingers on Hannibal’s forearm.

Hannibal smiles with one corner of his mouth but doesn’t take his eyes from the screen. “What is it, Will?”

“It’s still early,” says Will.

“Is it? All right, then.” 

**I’m a little mixed about this sex scene. When I first started out I assumed that of course they were in a sexual relationship, because lo, the Hannigram is strong in this one, but it’s also perfectly plausible that they’re not in a sexual relationship at all. In fact, I kind of like the idea that they share a bed and share this domestic life together _without_ having sex. **

**FWIW, I don’t think Hannibal has a sexual interest in Will, though he wouldn’t turn it down if Will tried to initiate a sexual relationship. Will, on the other hand, could potentially interpret the affection/fascination/love he has for Hannibal as being sexual, and might try to start something just because he thought he was supposed to. None of this keeps me from taking immense enjoyment in all the Hannigram porn I’ve been reading.**

Hannibal sets the tablet on the nightstand. When he turns back, Will is right there, already kissing him. He hasn’t brushed his teeth yet; Hannibal dislikes the strong artificial mint flavor of Will’s toothpaste. They kiss for a long time, unhurried after the fashion of longtime lovers. Will kisses the scars on Hannibal’s forearms, tugs down the waistband of Hannibal’s pyjamas until he can press his lips to the scar on Hannibal’s thigh. Hannibal is not yet all the way hard, but Will takes his cock in his mouth anyway, and works it with his tongue and lips until he can fit only the head in his mouth. It tastes musky and clean--Hannibal is as fastidious in this as he is in everything else--and Will sucks him slowly and dreamily. Hannibal rests his hand in Will’s hair and leaves it there, and Will closes his eyes and listens to Hannibal’s breathing go ragged.

Hannibal gasps. “Will, I--”

Will tightens his hold on Hannibal’s hip, and Hannibal goes stiff and comes with a grunt. Will swallows and holds Hannibal’s cock in his mouth until he begins to soften, until Hannibal pulls him back up to kiss him, licking the taste of himself out of Will’s mouth. Will hums in contentment, sucking in a breath when he feels Hannibal’s hand around his cock. “Ah, yeah,” he whispers, and bucks his hips into Hannibal’s grip. Hannibal’s other hand wanders down the curve of Will’s buttocks, fingers rubbing against his perineum and then pressing, dry, just a little way into Will’s opening. Will pants and clutches at Hannibal’s shoulders and comes with a sound like he’s being gutted.

Hannibal tsks and draws his hand away. “Now you need another shower.”

“Just clean me off,” Will slurs, and shivers when Hannibal obliges by cleaning Will with his warm, clever tongue.

The light clicks off, and they lie curled close together in the dark. Will thinks he should go brush his teeth, but he’s tired and sleepy and can hear Hannibal breathing. Hannibal’s fingers trace over the scar on Will’s shoulder, where he was once shot by a friend. They all have scars they left on each other. Even Abigail has them.

**I actually had to go back and add in all this scar talk, because I realized it was important that Will _doesn’t_ have a scar on his abdomen. But it was impossible to actually draw attention to it because in this dream world the finale never happened, so all I could do was have Hannibal focus on the scar on Will’s arm rather than the nonexistent scar on his belly and hope that the reader would go “hmmm…?”**

"Are you happy, Will?" Hannibal asks, though he does not sound uncertain about the answer.

"Mmm.” Will curls a little closer to Hannibal. "As happy as I'd ever hoped to be."

**I like to think that Hannibal asks this question to Will every night, and that Will’s answer is always the same. Until everything goes to hell. anyway.**

\-----

Hannibal is always up before Will. By the time Will gets downstairs, hair brushed and face washed, Hannibal has hot coffee and breakfast ready, and for this they eschew the formal dining room in favor of the bar. The back door is open for the dogs, who frolic in the grass, waiting for their own breakfasts. Sometimes Abigail is at breakfast too, depending on what time she has class that day.

Today is an Abigail-at-breakfast-day. She has a fork in one hand, delivering cheese omelette to her mouth, while her other hand turns the pages in a heavy textbook. Hannibal frowns on reading and eating at the same time (or eating and watching television at the same time; their home doesn’t even _have_ a TV), but he tolerates a lot of things for Abigail.

“How would you like your eggs?” Hannibal asks.

**It’s possibly unclear, but from here on out, this is the real Hannibal. The fake Hannibal is dead and hanging from a hook in the attic/studio space. The real Hannibal most likely broke in, lay in wait in the kitchen, and killed the fake Hannibal when he came downstairs to start the coffee.**

**Imagine, by the way, how incredibly stone cold Hannibal is. He’s just busted into Will’s dream, disposed of someone wearing his own face, and is now facing Will Graham--his soulmate, whom he recently gutted and left for dead, and who he assuredly has not seen in at least half a year--and asking him how he’d like his eggs. His brain is a box of rabid weasels.**

“Over easy.” Will always wants them over easy. Abigail wants them sometimes scrambled, sometimes poached, occasionally sunny side up, especially if there’s toast that she can use to sop up the runny yolks. Will tells himself he deserves the security to be found in being a creature of habit.

“Ham?” asks Hannibal.

**This is not people ham, by the way. I imagine real!Hannibal, after disposing of his dreamworld doppelganger, opened the fridge to see what there was in the way of food, spied the ham--it’s good ham, of course, because even fake!Hannibal would accept nothing less--and was like, oh, I suppose this was meant to be for breakfast, it’d be a shame to let that go to waste.**

“Yes, please.”

While Hannibal prepares Will’s breakfast, Will goes out the back door and whistles for the dogs. They trot up covered in bits of grass and furze and Will brushes them off, picking out the larger twigs from Casey’s long fur and wiping the mud from Harley’s paws. Only then does he let them inside for their food.

**Casey here might be an oversight. I went through several names for the dogs--I even drew up a fucking document so I could keep straight--and then at the last minute changed Casey’s name to Chester. Oops. Oh well.**

By the time this chore is done, Will’s own breakfast is ready: grilled ham and eggs, over-easy, and a dish of sliced fruit on the side. Hannibal’s fruit bowls only ever contain seasonal fruit, unlike the “fruit salads” of Will’s past that consisted mostly of underripe cubes of green and orange melon, with the occasional red surprise of a strawberry. Today’s fruit is raspberries, blueberries, and slivers of mango that melt in Will’s mouth. He enjoys the fruit more than the ham and eggs.

**See, my own food proclivities are showing through. Seasonal fruit salads, dressed with a little bit of lime and honey.**

**I had the most disappointing mango yesterday, BTW. Like….really disappointing.**

“That was amazing,” he sighs as Hannibal clears his empty dishes. “Thank you.”

“It is always my pleasure. “ The corners of Hannibal’s eyes crinkle, and Will smiles. He glimpses Abigail rolling her eyes as she slings her bag over her shoulder.

**GOD, YOU GUYS ARE SO GROSS.**

“I’m going to class,” she announces. “Bye!”

"Goodbye, Abigail," says Hannibal.

"Have a good day," says Will.

Will watches her go. When he looks at Hannibal, Hannibal is watching him.

"They grow up fast," Hannibal says; not an observation, but rather a recitation of Will's thoughts.

“Yeah.” Will finishes his coffee and gets up from the table. Since Hannibal is standing there and Abigail is not, he takes Hannibal’s hand in his, stroking his thumb over Hannibal’s knuckles. “What’re your plans for today?”

Hannibal tilts his chin upward in thought. “I have two patients in the morning. In the afternoon, I believe I will paint.”

**Hannibal checked his appointment book, of course. For verisimilitude.**

“Great.” Will smiles at him, aware that it’s a dopey smile. Hannibal returns it with a smile of restrained affection. “Have a good day, then. I’ll be back at the usual time.”

“See you tonight.” Hannibal vanishes into the kitchen, followed moments later by the sound of running water and dishes clinking against one another. Will puts on his shoes and shrugs on his coat. He descends the stairs outside the front door and opens the door to the street, where he freezes with one foot on the sidewalk.

There is a young woman impaled on a stag’s head in the middle of the road.

**At this point I didn’t really know what I was doing, and the incomplete version on the kinkmeme stops very soon after this, as I had to back up and take a long view of the thing. (I often “feel” that something is the right move, plot-wise, without actually knowing why; my writing process is based largely on intuition, which is usually pleasant but can sometimes be frustrating.) If Hannibal’s goal was to wake Will up, why not just kill him? That’d take care of it pretty quickly, since people wake up when they die (or go to Limbo, I guess, if there’s 7852332 layers to the dream). Oh, but if Will doesn’t have his token when he wakes up, then he’ll keep thinking he’s dreaming, like Leonardo DiCaprio’s wife in the movie. So Hannibal has to find a more organic way to wake Will up, first make him aware that this is a dream. And since he’s Hannibal, the way he does this is by leaving around a lot of dead bodies.**

On its antlers, rather. Her chest has been cut open, though from this angle Will can see little of it. There is surprisingly little blood; she must have been drained somewhere else before being put on display. These thoughts fly through Will’s mind like murmured voices in the background, even as Will raises one hand and presses it over his mouth.

_”Wake up, Will.”_

**In retrospect, I don’t know what I was doing with this voice. Like, who’s talking here? Hannibal’s also asleep, if he’s invading Will’s dream. Whatever.**

He flees back up the stairs.

Hannibal emerges from the kitchen as soon as he hears the door slam, his hands still wet. The dogs look up, ears pricked. “What’s wrong?”

“You.” Will marches straight toward Hannibal and clutches the front of his shirt. His breath hisses between his chattering teeth. “You promised you wouldn’t. Anymore. That you wouldn’t.”

**This wasn’t in the first version of the story. Originally, I constructed--or rather, Will constructed--a dream world in which Hannibal had never been a serial killer, and Abigail still had both ears and they were all living in Paris for some reason, and Beverly comes by to hang out and walk the dogs sometime and Georgia is a neighbor and ta-yada ta-yada. Then I realized this was not what the OP had asked for, which usually I would just shrug and be like, such is the nature of the kinkmeme, but I also really liked the idea that in Will’s dream world, it’s not that Hannibal was never a serial killer, but rather it’s that Will _tamed_ the serial killer. Also, it presented an opportunity for the line that turned up later on, in the climax of the story.**

**But that meant I couldn’t write in Beverly and Georgia, because it would ruin the versimilitude of the dream for people who were known to be dead in Mizumono to suddenly turn up in this dream world. Like, it seemed like the kind of thing that would distract Will from the “realism” of the dream. So I wrote in Alana and Jack and Abigail--people that we’re not certain if they lived or died in the finale--but had to leave it at that.**

“What are you talking about?” Hannibal’s slippery hands surround Will’s wrists, pulling his fingers loose from Hannibal’s shirt. Drops of water appear on the pressed cotton. Will tries to shake Hannibal, but Hannibal has always been the immovable object to Will’s irresistible force. He leans against Hannibal instead, shaking, his breath rattling in his chest. He closes his eyes when he feels Hannibal’s damp hand against the back of his neck. “Will, what did you see?”

Will takes a deep breath and holds it. He only manages to count to three before he has to let it out in an explosive huff. “Cassie Boyle.”

Hannibal’s hand, which had been stroking Will’s hair, stops. “Surely not.”

Will shuts his eyes. “Dead, in the middle of the street. Stag’s head and everything. Call Abigail.”

“Cassie Boyle is--”

“ _Call Abigail_.” Will swallows. “I want to make sure she’s safe.”

Hannibal clearly wants to argue, but he fishes the phone out of Will’s pocket anyway, his other hand still in Will’s hair. Will can feel Hannibal’s voice vibrate in his chest when he speaks. “Hello? Abigail? No, this is Hannibal. Where are you? The train? Good. When you arrive at school, remain there. Do not leave until Will or I call to tell you it’s all right.” A brief pause; Will can hear Abigail’s voice, high and tinny through the speaker, but can’t make out the words. “No, don’t worry. I’m sure it’s nothing. We just want to make sure you’re safe.” He hangs up and slips Will’s phone into his own pocket. His other hand has moved to cup Will’s jaw, thumb stroking over Will’s cheekbone. “Now: was it truly Cassie Boyle that you saw?”

**At first I couldn’t believe why Hannibal put Will’s phone in his own pocket. The line came so naturally I knew it was right, but there didn’t seem to be a reason for it. (See above re: my intuitive writing process.) After some thought, I realized it was actually an important plot point, because it’s how Jack Crawford--who functions as “security” in Will’s dream--attempts to contact Will to let him know that the dream is no longer safe. You’ll notice that Hannibal takes Will’s phone quite a few times, to clear his missed call log and delete voice mails.**

**For the record, I only saw Inception once, in theaters, so I have very little memory of it besides things spinning a lot. I read the Wikipedia entry to try and refresh my memory. I wanted there to be a scene where hundreds of Jack Crawfords appeared to try and stop Hannibal, but there didn’t really seem to be a way to do that without making the story 100K long.**

Will nods, eyes closing; warm and safe at home, with Hannibal’s skin against his, the events of ten minutes ago already seem unreal. Just to hear it spoken aloud is absurd.

“Just outside?”

Will firms his jaw. “I saw it.”

Hannibal drops his hand to squeeze Will’s shoulder. “Just one moment, if I may.” Will stays where he is, eyes closed and hands curled into loose fists, while Hannibal crosses the living room to throw open the curtains. Hannibal prefers a dim interior, and so the curtains are nearly always drawn when Hannibal is home. Will is conscious of a change in the ambient light quality, even against his eyelids. He feels a cold dog nose press into his hand and pets Chester absently.

“There is nothing out there,” Hannibal announces.

Will’s eyes fly open. “No.” He rushes to the window. Sure enough, the street below is as it should be: cars crawling past, pedestrians hurrying by with their suitcases and groceries and small children in tow. Where were they earlier? Had the cars been stopped, their drivers gawking? Had there been passersby standing and pointing, shielding the eyes of their children?

**I’m actually not sure how Hannibal accomplished this, but it also doesn’t matter because it’s all a dream. It’s so liberating, writing in a dream world. I can just wave my hand and be like, IT WAS MAGIC. WIZARD DID IT.**

He dashes down the stairs and flings open the front door. It looks just the same from street level. Sweat forms on Will’s forehead and along his hairline. He slams the door shut and presses his forehead against the heavy oak. He feels more than sees Hannibal descend the stairs behind him. Hannibal’s cool hand lays itself over Will’s eyes.

**That’s not his forehead, Hannibal. But who cares, because it looks good. You could put that image on a promotional poster for the show.**

“You’re warm,” Hannibal murmurs. “You may have a fever. Come upstairs; I’ll take your temperature.”

“I saw it,” Will mumbles. “I _saw_ it.”

“I have no doubt you saw something. Please, come. I’ll call the school for you.”

**Where does Will teach? It doesn’t matter. It’s a dream. WIZARD DID IT.**

Hannibal leads Will upstairs by the hand as if he were a child and deposits Will on the sofa, where the dogs come to nose at his fingers and lick his hands. He returns with a digital thermometer, which Will accepts under his tongue with absentminded obedience. Will closes his eyes and scratches Harley behind the ears, listening to Hannibal’s low voice informing someone that Mr. Graham is indisposed and will not be coming to work today. When Hannibal returns, he makes a seat for himself by Will’s knees and plucks out the thermometer. Will’s temperature is “a little high, perhaps, but then you are always a little warm. No cause for concern, I should say. Would you like to go back to bed?”

“I feel fine,” Will says, though he’s nauseous and sweaty. But he is nauseous and sweaty because of what he saw, or thought he saw. Chester licks his hand. “I want to stay down here with the dogs.”

“As you wish.”

Will catches Hannibal's wrist before he can rise. "I'm sorry. I yelled at you earlier."

Hannibal gives Will a faint, distant smile, like the ones in therapy when they first met. "You cannot be blamed for it. What you saw reminded you of me, and here I am."

**I would like to repeat what a stone cold bastard Hannibal is in this story. Like, wow, dude. Wow.**

"Yeah, but--you promised. I know you wouldn't break your promise."

"I take my promises very seriously." Hannibal turns his hand so that he can give Will’s a squeeze before letting go of it. "Please rest."

**You’ll note that Hannibal doesn’t actually lie here; I prefer to write smart characters who evade the question rather than lie, although that’s not necessarily in character for Hannibal, who really does just STRAIGHT UP LIE. Like, goddamn.**

"Okay," says Will. "Don't let me keep you from work."

"You won't," Hannibal replies. "Hush."

He covers Will with a blanket. Warm and surrounded by dogs, in the dim light of the living room, Will thinks that maybe he can fall asleep. Maybe then he’ll wake up.

**It just occurred to me that I guess Will and Hannibal are basically living in emungere’sWhere All Ladders Start world, with added Abigail. That’s nice.**

\-----

“Will? What’re you doing here?”

Will blinks his eyes open. “Alana?” One of the dogs--Buffy, probably--slides off his torso and onto the floor with a jingle of tags and a clatter of nails against the hardwood.

Alana stands next to the couch, keys still in her hand. One of the curtains is halfway open, spilling light into the living room. “I just came by to walk the dogs. Are you all right?”

**I originally tried to write this scene with Beverly but gave it up after a few sentences. It was too weird to have Beverly here when Abigail was missing her ears, and it felt like a wrong detail. But I still needed someone for Will to talk to that wasn’t Hannibal or Abigail. I tried Alana instead and she seemed to fit, and is canonically someone who could get along with Will’s dogs.**

“Um, yeah, maybe, I guess.” Will sits up and scrubs his knuckles across his face. His tongue feels furry, and his throat sticks to itself. “Called in sick today.”

“Mmm.” Alana steps closer, bends down a little. “May I--?” Before Will can even understand the question in order to formulate an answer, her hand is on his forehead. “You _might_ be a little warm.”

Will shakes off her hand. “Hannibal took my temperature already. Nothing alarming, but he thought maybe I should stay home.” He heaves himself to his feet, the blanket slithering off of him and halfway onto the floor, where Buster immediately sits on it. “Sorry nobody told you, although, I mean, since you’re here, you can walk the dogs anyway? I can, I can go with you.”

Alana smiles. “If you’re not feeling well, you should really rest.”

“I’m fine. We’ll go back if I start feeling worse.”

The dogs are already restless--they know what it means when Alana comes over--so Alana just nods and gestures toward the back door.

Most of the dogs are well-mannered enough to wait until Will sets foot on the back porch, but Fitz explodes out onto the grass between their legs. Will whistles, and Fitz halts, one leg cocked and one ear tilted back, quivering. “Go on,” Will says, and Fitz bolts through the grass, turning on one paw at some invisible point in the grass to rocket back toward them, tongue lolling out of his mouth. Will grins to watch it. It’s safer here, for the dogs: no wolves, no coyotes, no bears.

**Judging from Winston and Buster, Will seems to favor people names for his dogs (so not names like Soccer or Cheeseburger or Thunder), albeit unusual, kind of old-fashioned people names: hence, Chester and Fitz and Mal and Harley, and so on. A friend was kind enough to send me pictures of all the dogs and their dog actors’ names; some of them I kept and some of them I changed.**

The grass crunches under their feet as they walk; their breath frosts in the air. The dogs range back and forth around them, sometimes dashing off to investigate the base of a certain tree, and then coming back to make sure their humans are still here. Chester and Winston wrestle over a stick.

Paris lies outside the front door, and there the seasons always change, as do the fruits and vegetables in the markets where Hannibal buys their food: corn and strawberries in the warm and sunny summers, potatoes and citrus in the cool and rainy winters. But out the back the landscape is not unlike the land around Will’s old home in Wolf Trap, Virginia, the trees frozen in a riot of autumn color and the sky even more blue in comparison, the air crisp and tasting of apple cider. Will fishes in the river, and Abigail hunts in the forest for rabbits, wild pigs, and the occasional deer.

**This is a BIG CLUE that there is something seriously off here. Like, how the fuck is it Paris outside the front door and Virginia outside the back door? Not to mention, you know, how or why is Alana stopping by to walk the dogs?**

“Has he really changed?” Alana asks.

Will starts out of his reverie. “What? Who, Hannibal?”

Alana keeps her hands on her pockets and her eyes trained on the ground in front of her. She nods.

Will swallows down the accusations he made that morning. “He promised. That he wouldn’t lie, and that he wouldn’t manipulate me, and that he wouldn’t kill anymore.”

“You realize he might have been lying and manipulating you when he made that promise,” Alana points out. “You know what he is.”

“Yeah, but.” Will stops walking. He takes a deep breath, holds it, and lets it out again. “It’s hard to explain.”

Alana comes around to face him. Her hands are still in her pockets, but she meets his eyes now. “So explain it to me.”

“He…” Will fiddles with the button on his jacket pocket. “He got something, what he wanted from me. So now I get to ask for something from him.”

**This is really Will having a conversation with himself. Any conversation he has with a dream-person, in this story, is a conversation with himself. Here, he’s trying to convince himself that Cassie Boyle this morning was an anomaly, that Hannibal really has changed, that everything is fine. It also conveniently provides some exposition for the reader.**

Alana is silent. Will counts his heartbeats in the interim. They are slow and steady. “I don’t know who’s crazier,” she says at last.

Will gives a breathy little laugh. The skin around his mouth feels stretched and stiff. “Me neither.”

They keep walking, until Will decides he wants to turn around and look at the house. From back here, especially at night, it looks just like his house in Wolf Trap, windows glowing with warmth and safety in the dark. From the front, it looks like a second-story apartment in a hip Parisian neighborhood. They’ve made compromises.

“If you don’t trust Hannibal, then why do you still come over and walk the dogs?” he asks.

Alana smiles at him, and Will feels an old, tired longing press against his diaphragm. “Because you asked me to.”

\------

**I realized only after I’d written the entire fic that there’s a weird time issue here, partly having to do with my own lifestyle. I prefer to eat dinner kind of early, around six, so I would normally start preparing dinner around four (well, if I didn’t have to be at the office until six). So I thought it would be reasonable for Alana to come over around say, one or two in the afternoon to walk the dogs, and then she and Will would stay out for a couple of hours and come back while Hannibal’s preparing dinner.**

**However, Hannibal appears to eat dinner much later than I do; he’s a dinner at eight or nine kinda guy (which makes sense, if he has evening appointments as late as 7:30), and hence would probably start prepping dinner around six. And yet, dinner was on the table when Will got home yesterday? Where does he teach? Does he teach an evening class? Argh. It’s a dream. Wizard did it.**

Hannibal is home; Will can hear him in the kitchen. Alana helps Will towel off the dogs but declines an invitation to dinner. Will thinks that she still doesn’t like being in the same room with Hannibal, and who can blame her? She kisses him on the cheek goodbye and clicks down the stairs.

Abigail is home too, peeling tiny carrots over the sink, while Hannibal scrapes at a pan on the stove. “So what was that about, this morning?” she asks when Will comes into the kitchen. “You really freaked me out.”

Will rubs one hand over his face. “It was--I overreacted to something. Seeing things. So I took the day off from work.”

“Seeing things? Like, what, hallucinations?” Abigail rinses the carrots, sweeps them into a bowl, and starts pitting cherries. Hannibal thinks she shows great promise in the kitchen.

Will rolls up his sleeves. “What’s for dinner? Can I help?”

“Was it drugs?”

“ _No!_ ” Will’s jaw drops. “No, it was not drugs--”

“Then what was it?” Abigail looks over her shoulder at Will, her eyes hard. “You can tell me.”

**I was very unsure of Abigail’s characterization all through this story, but you know what? It’s a dream. This isn’t actually Abigail, it’s Will’s characterization of Abigail. I’M FREEEEEEE**

“I.” Will sighs. “Maybe it was a hallucination. I don’t know. I saw a murder this morning. A body. One from before.”

Abigail’s eyes widen. “Before, you mean--before before?”

“Yeah.” Will presses his lips together.

“Like, the exact same body, or--”

“Abigail.” Hannibal’s tone is stern. “Will had quite a fright this morning, and all he wished was to ascertain that you were safe. I regret that the call I made to you this morning caused you undue distress, but I believe we would all rather be safe than sorry.” He turns to Will. “Would you decant the wine?”

“Glad to know you trust me with a corkscrew,” Will says, dryly, but is glad to escape to the wine pantry. Once there, he realizes he has absolutely no idea what’s for dinner, and ends up selecting a Pinot Noir, which pairs well with most things that Hannibal likes to cook.

**A previous version of this scene had Will go in the wine pantry knowing that they were having duck for dinner, and so was able to select a Burgundy. Then I rearranged the conversation and that didn’t happen anymore, so now poor Will has to be psychic. Sorry, Will.**

When he returns to the kitchen, he finds only Hannibal, slicing tiny cherry tomatoes. “Where’d Abigail go?”

“Upstairs.” Hannibal crosses to the stove to check on a steaming pan. 

Will fishes the corkscrew out of a drawer. “You didn’t send her to her room, did you?”

“Hardly.” Hannibal tips in the bowl of tiny carrots that Abigail had peeled earlier. “I did, however, tell her what you saw. “ He glances at Will. “I assumed that you had no desire to relive the experience.”

“No, you’re right, I just.” Will sighs as he pours the wine into the decanter. “I guess there’s no good in keeping things from her.”

“Not at all. She is a grown woman with a lifetime of being kept in the dark. I believe she would prefer to know the truth, and be treated as an equal.” Hannibal removes a plate of gorgeous dark meat from the refrigerator. “If you will set the table, dinner will be ready soon.”

Will’s mouth waters; he remembers that he skipped lunch.

Their dinner conversation is, perhaps, more muted than usual. Abigail seems sullen (although perhaps that is only Will’s imagination), and Will is disinclined to talk about his nothing of a day. But the carrots are perfectly cooked: not too sweet, nor too crunchy. The cherries provide a sweet complement to the bold, flavorful duck and the salty goat cheese. Hannibal describes the irresistible pink Momotaro tomatoes that he purchased today at the market. “I’ll find something to do with them tomorrow,” he says, and Will has no doubt that he will.

 **This is actuallya recipe from entree-humain, and not the last one I’ll steal for fic purposes. I reckon myself a pretty good cook, but again, not innovative.**

Abigail disappears after cleanup, and Will watches her ascend the stairs to the bedrooms with some wistfulness. He feels with a twist in his chest that there’s something that he wants to say to her, but he doesn’t know what that is.

“We have not had an opportunity to be a family for very long,” Hannibal says. Will turns to find that Hannibal has been watching him. “And yet she grows beyond us already. Perhaps always was.”

“Yeah, well.” Will looks down at the knife he’s holding as if he’s forgotten what he was doing with it. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”

“You felt responsible for her. You still do. But she does not feel that way.” Hannibal shuts the dishwasher. “We must let go of our image of her. It is not the real thing.”

“‘We,’” Will murmurs. “I think you mean...me.”

“We,” Hannibal repeats.

**A hint, of course, that This Is All A Dream. Hannibal knows it; Will doesn’t remember. Not yet, anyway.**

\-----

Still tired from their long walk that afternoon and full from dinner, the dogs hardly want to budge for their before-bed bathroom break. Will practically has to pick Mal up and put her outside. He stays on the porch to make sure they’ll stick close to the house and whistles them in after fifteen minutes. They go straight to their beds in the living room and stay there. Will feels strangely dead on his feet as well, given that he had a nap that morning. Maybe the walk was long for him, too.

Hannibal is already in bed, propped up against the headboard and reading a paper copy of a psychiatry journal. Will finds this image charming, compared to yesterday’s high-tech Dr. Lecter with his tablet. He slips in under the covers next to Hannibal and curls up close against his side. Hannibal lets his hand sink down into Will’s hair, eyes not leaving the page.

“Should I be worried?” Will asks.

“About what?” Hannibal lets the magazine drop into his lap and looks down at Will. “At what you saw this morning?”

“Yeah. What if I’m hallucinating again?”

Hannibal cards his fingers through Will’s curls. “What if you are?”

“I don’t feel like I’m hallucinating,” Will muses. “It’s not like last time. Last time I felt crazy. A different crazy than I normally feel. But this time I feel fine. This morning was a normal morning.”

Hannibal sets the magazine on the nightstand and lets himself sink down in the pillows until he’s more on a level with Will, facing him. “Perhaps this morning was an anomaly. A lingering effect of a nightmare, or a daydream, or a flashback.”

“Maybe.” Will is ready to believe that’s what it was. It seems a lifetime ago, and he’s ready to sleep and put it behind him. “I hope so.”

**I would like again to bring your attention to what a brass-balled bastard Hannibal is here. What the fuck is even going on in your head, man.**

\-----

Will opens his eyes in the dark. He squints at the digital clock on his nightstand, which reports that it’s a little past five in the morning. What woke him? Probably nothing; even without the dreams it’s not as if his sleep has always been peaceful. Will rolls himself out of bed.

He shuts the door to the master bathroom behind him so that the light won’t disturb Hannibal. It’s too bright after the suffocating darkness of the bedroom, and Will takes his piss with his eyes nearly shut. He flushes, totters over to the sink to wash his hands, and looks up into the mirror. He freezes, water still running over his hands.

Behind him, where there are supposed to be two towel racks, is Marissa Schurr, impaled on two sets of antlers.

“ _Wake up, Will._ ”

He loses time after that.

It’s possible that he screamed, that he stumbled out of the bathroom and fell on the floor and all but crawled away on his hands and knees. The next thing he knows, he’s sitting in the hallway outside their bedroom, knees pulled up against his chest and forehead pressed against them, and Hannibal’s hand is on Will’s shoulder and he is saying his name in a quiet, soothing voice, over and over again.

Will takes a deep breath and tries to hold it. It explodes out of him in something terrifyingly close to a sob.

“Will. What did you see?”

**That was completely intentional, BTW, the constant and consistent usage of “What did you see?” and “Tell me what you see.”**

“In the bathroom,” Will gasps. “Go, go look.”

Hannibal’s touch lingers; if it were Will, he wouldn’t want to leave his hysterical partner to look for something in the bathroom, either. But eventually Hannibal squeezes Will’s shoulder and gets up. Will remains in the comfortable darkness, trying to get his breathing under control. He can feel his heartbeat in his whole body, battering against his spine. 

Hannibal comes padding back and lays his warm hand on Will’s shoulder again. “There’s nothing there. Well, nothing than the usual bathroom.”

A strange, awful noise tears its way out of Will’s throat. “Oh God.” 

“Shh, shh, shh.” Hannibal’s hand moves up into Will’s hair. “What did you see?”

“Antlers.” Will’s breath gives a horrifying hitch. “M-Marissa Schurr.”

Hannibal’s silence is devastating.

“Why is this _happening?_ ” For some reason, Will doesn’t raise his voice. He should probably be shouting, but it comes out in a high, thready whisper. “I’m losing my _mind_ , and I, I’m not sick, it doesn’t feel like last time--”

“It’s not the encephalitis, no,” Hannibal agrees.

**AND YOU WOULD KNOW, WOULDN’T YOU.**

“Then what’s happening to me?!” Will finally looks up. All he can see of Hannibal in the dim light are the whites of his corneas and the suggestion of cheekbones and lips.

Hannibal says nothing for long moments, hand moving through Will’s hair as if he’s forgotten to stop it. “Can you think of no other reason you might be having these...visions? Something other than illness?”

Will stares. “What, like--I don’t even know what you’re asking. Like, am I having a psychotic break?”

“No, no, nothing of the sort,” Hannibal hastens to assure him. “But if you’re under stress at work, or if some formerly repressed memory has surfaced, then perhaps…”

**Here’s Hannibal, trying to probe a little without setting off too many alarms…**

Will shakes his head. “No stress at work. No--repressed memories, whatever that means.” He presses the heels of his hands against his eyes. “Don’t psychoanalyze this. Me. Please. If I need therapy-- _more_ therapy--I’ll go to someone else.”

“My apologies.”

Hannibal lowers himself to the floor, to sit with his back against the wall as Will is. Will’s never seen Hannibal do that before. There are many things he’s never seen Hannibal do: eat a fast food cheeseburger; attend a baseball game; play Monopoly. But he has no doubt that he would do all those things, if Will asked him to. If Will wanted to do them.

**This is not an intentional shoutout to theeverydayhannibal tumblr here, but I do love that blog and find it hilarious.**

“I think I can go back to bed now,” Will says, quietly.

“Good.” Hannibal heaves himself to his feet and gives Will a strong hand up. Will’s gone stiff from sitting so long on the floor, but it’s not very far from the hallway to bed. Will relaxes as soon as he’s under the covers, Hannibal’s reassuring heat just a few inches away.

Hannibal’s hand slides over Will’s neck and down his shoulder. “Tomorrow we’ll go see a doctor.”

“Okay,” Will mumbles, already fading into sleep.

\----

Light streams into the bedroom from the open curtains when Will opens his eyes. He swings his legs out of bed and peers into the master bathroom, where there is no sign of a half-naked, dripping corpse. It still smells faintly of Hannibal’s shampoo and aftershave. He washes his face, brushes his teeth, shaves, dresses, and goes downstairs. By that time, he can smell coffee.

Hannibal sets a glass mug of coffee on the counter for Will. As usual, he is dressed only in shirtsleeves and slacks in the kitchen, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, an apron tied on over his clothing. “Breakfast?”

“Please,” Will says.

“Eggs over easy,” says Hannibal. “Sausage?”

**I like to think that this is a subtle difference between the real Hannibal and the fake Hannibal. The fake Hannibal asked Will how he wants his eggs every morning, even though Will always wants them over easy. The real Hannibal, however, tries to ascertain a pattern.**

“Absolutely.”

Will takes the coffee with him as he lets the dogs out the back door and scoops out their breakfasts. The sun is bright and the day is clear. He stands barefoot on the porch with his coffee and tries to summon the terror he felt last night.

He goes back in the house, where Hannibal is flattening little balls of sausage with his hands to make patties. “Did I, um.” He licks his lips. “Did I have a nightmare last night?”

Hannibal lays two sausage patties in the pan to sizzle. “You were awake at the time, but I suppose one could characterize it that way.”

**I really wrestled with myself whether or not it was going to be loose sausage--made into patties--or links, as we see Hannibal make in the show. I decided that loose sausage was easier, given the short amount of time Hannibal has to do everything.**

Will rubs his face with his hands. “Shit. I thought...I thought it might’ve been a dream.”

“I was awake for it as well, so I regret to inform you that it happened. Or at least, you thought it happened.” Hannibal cracks two eggs in alongside the sausages. “I said that we would go to a doctor today.”

**Cooking eggs and sausage alongside each other is harder than you’d think, by the way. I fail miserably at it half the time. The eggs cook too fast and are overdone by the time the sausage is ready, or the eggs are ready and the sausage is half raw. Sigh.**

“Um.” Will sets his coffee down and leans against the counter. “I’m not sure that’s necessary.”

Hannibal looks up at Will. “You seemed very distressed last night.”

“Yeah, well, it was the middle of the night, and I was tired, and I was probably...seeing things.”

Hannibal contemplates the pan. He flips the sausages. “I’m afraid I must insist. There was also the incident the morning before, where you saw Cassie Boyle, and you have a history of hallucinations and mental disorders.”

He says the words so blandly that Will can’t be insulted; it’s true, after all. And Hannibal didn’t say that Will _thought_ he saw Cassie Boyle. Will relaxes. “All right. But, I mean, don’t we need to make an appointment? Don’t those need to be made in advance?”

“I know someone at the Université Paris Descartes that I believe will make time for us. Why don’t you call the school and let them know you are taking today off as well?”

**I don’t know how Hannibal does this without setting off every alarm bell Jack Crawford has. Wizard did it.**

Will realizes he hasn’t seen his phone since...when was the last time he saw his phone? He looks for it in the living room, in the front entryway, and in the pocket of the jacket he wore yesterday. He stands in the middle of the living room and retraces his steps. Finally, he finds it upstairs, tucked into the drawer of his nightstand, after he remembers that Hannibal used it to call Abigail. Will calls the school and reaches the receptionist, and it requires no acting for his voice to come out frail and exhausted.

**No missed calls? That’s Hannibal, deleting Will’s phone records again.**

By the time he returns to the kitchen, his breakfast is ready on the counter: eggs and sausage patties and a hunk of toasted French bread. Abigail wanders in then, her hair still tousled from sleep, and pours herself coffee from the urn. “Cheese omelette?” Hannibal queries, and when Abigail nods, Hannibal cracks two eggs in a bowl and begins whisking. Abigail fetches a wedge of gruyere from the refrigerator and a microplane from the drawer. Will hoists himself up onto the stool and digs into his breakfast, watching Hannibal and Abigail move around each other in the kitchen with an enviable precision. 

The sausage is well-spiced, and the eggs are perfectly done; Will remembers, with a sudden painful pang, that first breakfast that he and Hannibal shared together, when he didn’t know that he was eating Cassie Boyle’s lungs. He doesn’t know why that memory hurts so much when they’re here, together now, and Hannibal doesn’t cook people anymore.

**Haaaaaaahahahahaha.**

“Something wrong, Will?” Hannibal has paused by the stove, spatula in one hand, while Abigail grates cheese over her omelette. When she’s done, Hannibal starts moving the pan back and forth with practiced, fluid motions.

**This isa Julia Child omelette method. Julia Child was a wizard. _Really_ hard to render gracefully into text, though; Julia actually uses the word “jerking,” which I could not use here for obvious reasons.**

Will shakes his head and takes another bite of sausage. “It’s nothing.”

“Did you have a nightmare last night?” Abigail asks, leaning with her back against the counter. “I thought I heard you screaming.”

Will gulps down a bite of egg without chewing. “Shit, did I wake you? I’m sorry.”

“We’re going to see the doctor today,” Hannibal says, eyes fixed on the pan, where the eggs have begun to coagulate. “So do not be surprised if we’re not home, later.”

“The doctor?” Abigail looks up, eyebrows high with alarm. “It’s not--is it something serious?”

“Unlikely.” The puddle of eggs in the pan has transformed into a creamy, fluffy omelette. 

**My bad, I guess the Julia Child omelette isn’t “fluffy” per se. I’ve actually never used the above method, mostly owing to the fact that I’m too lazy to make myself omelettes. I stick to eggs in a basket or just scrambled eggs.**

Hannibal slides it onto a plate and garnishes with a sprinkle of parsley from the cutting board. “But it would assuage both our fears to rule it out immediately.” He touches Abigail’s cheek. She looks up at him, and he sweeps his thumb across her hair. “Don’t worry, Abigail. We wouldn’t leave you here alone.” He sets her breakfast on the counter. “Bon appétit.”

**Man, the nerve of that guy.**

_We_ , Will thinks; Hannibal is so careful with his words. In reality, Will knows very well--they all know--who the unstable one is in their uneasy family. It says something about the state of affairs, when the former serial killer is the reliable one. But Will forces himself to say, “It’ll be okay,” and eats his last bite of toast.

\-----

Dr. Sauvage is about Hannibal’s age and closer to Will in height. He has a receding hairline, a neatly trimmed beard that’s still more blonde than gray, and black-rimmed glasses considerably more fashionable than Will’s own. His shirt is blue, his tie complementary, and his lab coat is well-pressed. He looks and acts very professional, and Will is not at all certain why dread has settled over him like a damp, cold blanket.

**That’s a straight up description of Dr. Sutcliffe. Sauvage, of course, is “Savage.” Kind of an obvious hint, but I couldn’t resist.**

Will submits to a brief physical exam and a few psychological tests (including drawing a clock), and Dr. Sauvage pronounces him, “Very little sign of any abnormality, at least, any more than what Dr. Lecter gives me to understand are your usual abnormalities.” His English is impeccable, albeit accented, much like Hannibal’s. “Still, if you do not mind being gawked at by medical students, we can certainly get you in for a brain scan, just to rule it out.”

“That’d be great,” Will says. The fluorescent lights make his eyes hurt, and the walls of the exam room throb and press in on him. He is uncomfortably reminded of Dr. Chilton’s scrutiny, and the scrutiny of every person of a medical profession who held a covetous interest in Will Graham’s mind. (Even Hannibal, in the end; but Will has long since given up being angry about that.)

Dr. Sauvage checks his watch. “I’ll have to check the schedule for the machine.”

The machine will not be available to them for two hours. Will is loathe to leave just to come back in an hour, but Hannibal has afternoon patients to attend to, not to mention a deep need to purchase some fresh butter. “I’ll be fine,” Will says. “I’ll find a café to kill some time, and I’ll call you afterward.”

Hannibal’s body leans toward Will, even as his feet point toward the door . “If you’re certain,” he says at last. “Do you have your phone?”

Will fishes it out of his jacket pocket. “Yep.”

“All right, then. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

Will leaves the building. He finds a café, he purchases a newspaper and a coffee and a sandwich, smoked salmon and lettuce and tomatoes spread across a crispy baguette. It’s not as good as something Hannibal would have made, but it makes for an inexpensive and tasty lunch. He reads the newspaper cover to cover, despite knowing very little French. The coffee is excellent. Afterward, Will takes a stroll along the Boulevard Saint-Germain, peering into shop windows. He pretends he’s someone else: someone who has a wife, maybe, and a baby daughter, and a bulldog. Maybe he works in an office where he wears collared shirts and ties to work, while his wife works from home. Or, no; perhaps she’s an architect. Their daughter is starting primary school in the fall.

Half an hour before their appointed time, Will turns back to the medical school. His excellent memory leads him to Dr. Sauvage’s office. He’s 15 minutes early; he’ll wait if Dr. Sauvage isn’t there. He goes to knock on the door and spies a red streak on the doorknob.

Will thinks, with a sickening resignation, that he should have expected this: Dr. Sauvage sprawled back in his chair, his face cut nearly in half so that his tongue protrudes like the mast from a ship. There’s a surprising lack of blood.

**I had to stare at a lot of screen caps for this scene. Not super pleasant, but also not the worst thing I had to research for this fic. If I write any more Hannibal fanfics it’s only gonna get worse from here.**

“ _Wake up._ ”

He stumbles backward, out of the room, perhaps with a startled little cry and perhaps not. Why is he so surprised? After Cassie Boyle, after Marissa Schurr, this is what was next. Will whirls, looks up and down, but the hallway is empty. He fumbles his phone out of his pocket and dials Hannibal.

The phone rings down the hall.

**I think, by the way, that Jack tried to call Will while he was outside, but Will didn’t hear his phone ring because of the street noise. Now he’s too frantic to see that he has a missed call, or he saw it and then dismissed it. And then after this he loses his phone again.**

Will blinks. Hannibal comes striding up, brow furrowed, his hand halfway into his pocket. “What is it, Will?”

“Dr. Sauvage is dead.” Will swallows. “L-like Dr. Sutcliffe. He’s, he’s right in there, his face is all.” He makes an awkward, half-circular gesture around his own jaw. 

Hannibal’s face is grave. He touches Will’s shoulder, just a brief brush of his fingers, but it grounds him. “Wait here.” 

He steps through the open door behind Will. Will stands and waits, running both hands over his face. Moments later, Hannibal sticks his head out the door. “Will, come in here please.”

Will sidles into Dr. Sauvage’s office, face still averted. He looks at Hannibal’s shoulder instead, clad in reassuring brown checks.

“Tell me what you see.”

Will squeezes his eyes shut. “Please don’t.”

“Will. Please look. And tell me what you see.”

**Again, very intentional phrasing.**

He opens his eyes. He looks. He sees Dr. Sauvage, his head flung backward over the top of his chair. He sees spots of blood on Dr. Sauvage’s blue shirt and on his tie. He sees Dr. Sauvage’s teeth, pale and exposed in the light. The lighting here is much nicer than it was in the exam room.

“I see Dr. Sauvage.” Will’s voice comes out hoarse. “He’s dead. His face has been cut open in a Glasgow smile.” He shuts his eyes. “What do you see?”

“I see nothing. The room is empty.”

Now Will’s voice shakes. “Don’t lie to me.”

“Why do you think that I am lying?”

“You promised. That you wouldn’t lie, you wouldn’t manipulate me.”

“As you say,” Hannibal agrees. “And I see nothing. The office is empty. As a matter of fact, Dr. Sauvage called me earlier and said that something had come up, that he would not be able to perform the brain scan today. That’s why I came to pick you up.”

**Here’s that straight-up lying bastard we all know and love.**

Will opens his eyes. Dr. Sauvage is still there. “Whoever’s doing this,” he says, “and someone _is_ doing this, someone is trying to, to get inside my head. That person, they know me well, they knew me before, from the past, and they. They’re sending me a message.”

Hannibal pauses before replying. “And what is the message?”

Dried blood flecks Dr. Sauvage’s beard.

“You can’t run from this,” Will says.

\-----

The drive home is silent. Will stares out the window at the elegant Parisian facades, the old-fashioned streetlamps, people sitting at outdoor tables and smoking over their pommes frites. He can see Hannibal’s reflection in the window. Hannibal keeps his eyes on the road most of the time, but occasionally, when they’re stopped at a red light, his gaze slides over to Will. His face is impassive, but Will knows by now that that means nothing. Hannibal wears his expressions like suits.

Abigail isn’t home; still on campus, probably. That’s fine. That’s great. That allows Will to shed his jacket on the couch, whistle for the dogs, and barrel straight out the back door without having to make any explanations. 

**See, that right there, when Will threw his jacket on the couch? His phone was in there.**

The sun is shining but the air is cool, with just the faintest bit of humidity. Will plunges straight ahead, the tall grass snapping under his feet, while the dogs bound alongside him. Winston sticks close by his side, glancing up once in a while to see if Will needs anything from him. Will tousles his ears.

The river opens up before him. Will pauses on the shore, but Harley and Fitz race right on in. Buffy barks at them from the bank, her little paws pattering back and forth. Winston leans against Will’s knees, and Will buries his hands in the dog’s ruff.

“Will?”

Will turns. Alana is crunching across the fallen leaves and twigs toward him, hands in her peacoat, dark hair falling across her shoulders. “Oh. Hey. What’re you doing here?”

**Alana originally wasn’t in this scene, but after I wrote the rest of the fic, I thought it was weird that Alana only showed up once. So I wrote her into a little conversation here that also turned out to be useful; remember, every conversation that Will has with a character that’s not Hannibal is actually a conversation with himself.**

“Came to walk the dogs. Hannibal said you were out here.” She picks her way through the rocks to stand next to Will. Her boots are leather suede, impractical for walking a pack of dogs through the Virginia countryside. “You’re making me think I’m going to be out of a job.”

Will smears his hand across his face, but he can’t push down the smile. “Sorry, sorry. I’ve been...preoccupied.”

“Do you want to talk about it?” Alana puts on her most sympathetic face. “You’re not obligated to talk about it,” she adds. “It must be hard, living with one therapist and being friends with another.”

“It’s good for me, probably. Means I’m…taken care of.” He scrubs the palms of his hands against his jeans.

A loosening of the skin here, a tightening of a muscle there, and Alana’s expression transforms from sympathetic to concerned. “Do you need taking care of, Will?”

“I dunno. I dunno!” Will blows out a breath. “I’ve started seeing things. Again.”

Alana’s eyes widen. “You are? Like what? What’ve you been seeing?”

“Old...old memories. Old murders.” Will swallows. He doesn’t make eye contact. “Cassie Boyle, Marissa Schurr. Dr. Sutcliffe.”

Alana doesn’t reply right away. “Are they flashbacks?”

“Yes. No. I don’t know. They’re not triggered by anything in particular, they’re just...happening.” Will flexes his hands. “Hannibal took me to see a doctor today. A neurologist. But we had to come back before we could do a brain scan.”

Alana’s expression turns grave. “You know what happened the last time you saw a neurologist, Will.”

“I know.”

“You can’t trust Hannibal.”

“I know.” Will looks up at the sky. “I know.”

\-----

Will sees Alana to the front door. As he holds the door open for her, she goes up on her toes to press a kiss to Will’s cheek. “Be careful,” she says, and before Will can ask her what she means, she’s gone and left Will with only a lingering sense of her perfume, something youthful and floral. 

Hannibal is nowhere to be seen. In his studio, perhaps, painting: the new hobby he picked up when he was no longer allowed to make art out of people’s lives. 

**For what it’s worth, the fake Hannibal really did paint. That was an actual art studio up there, with plastic on the floor to keep paint from getting everywhere, and there was a window that let in natural light. But once the real Hannibal got in, he transformed it into something more practical.**

Will pads around the house, picking things up and putting them down again, and the dogs follow him with anxious nails clicking against the hardwood floors. He stops when he hears his phone ringing from inside the coat closet.

It stops ringing before he gets to it. He has one missed call from Jack Crawford, and a voice mail. Will listens to it.

_”Will? Have you been getting my messages? We’ve been compromised. Hannibal is here.”_

That’s it. Will stares at the phone, baffled. He plays the message again. It makes no more sense the second time. He tries calling Jack. The phone rings and rings, but nobody picks up.

**It’s just a security system. Wizard did it.**

\-----

He hears the door open and close from inside the study. “Abigail?”

“Will?” Abigail pokes her head into the study. “Oh, you’re home. How was the appointment?”

Will lets go of the fly and places his hands on his thighs. “Fine, I guess. We have to go back for the brain scan another day.”

“Oh.” Abigail seems disappointed. “When?”

“I don’t know. We’ll schedule the appointment later.”

Abigail presses her lips together. She studies a corner of the ceiling and Will thinks, with a sad, heavy bloom in his chest, that if she were his daughter, he would think that was one way in which she took after him.

Finally, she asks, “Wanna go hunting?”

Will’s eyebrows hitch up his forehead. “That sounds great.”

**I really wanted to give Abigail something to do besides die, but alas, that is in fact the tragic story of Abigail. But she’d been very peripheral to the story, despite being one of the most important figures in Will’s recent life, and I owed it to her--and to Will--to give her some centrality. So I sent them hunting, and discovered that Abigail could have a very pivotal role in the story after all.**

Abigail has never asked Will to come hunting with her before. She doesn’t trust him, for which Will doesn’t blame her; hunting is a difficult business, and she is more proficient than he is, even with the handicap of her affected hearing. Will hunted when he was younger, but he came to prefer the more contemplative sport of fishing.

They fetch their boots, their camouflage gear, their guns, their water canteens. The dogs whine and wag their tails, but Will shuts the door in their faces.

“I hope I don’t scare off all the deer,” Will says.

Abigail shrugs. “If you do, we’ll just have chicken for dinner.”

No need for orange safety gear here; there will be no one in the woods except for them (and hopefully, the deer). They trek across the fields without a word. It’s rare that Will wants to break a silence; rarer still that he doesn’t feel the other person wielding that silence as a weapon. Only with Abigail and Hannibal does he see quiet as a peaceful companion between them.

They find the body by the river, where Will and the dogs were just a few hours ago. It’s so charred and blackened that it resembles little more than a twisted tree branch, but Will knows that it is a she, just as surely as he knows who this body is, or who she is supposed to represent. Will lets the gun fall from his shoulder to hang loosely from his fingers, muzzle dipping into the dirt. Next to him, Abigail sucks in a breath.

“What,” she says, voice shaking, “is _that._ ”

Will jerks his head up. “Can you see it?”

“Of course I see it!” Abigail’s voice goes high and shrill. “Is that a _body?_ ”

**This is the moment where it starts to come together for Will, very concretely. Like, he’s had his suspicions--you can tell from his “conversations” with Alana--but here is the moment where he realizes that Hannibal has been lying to him.**

Will stares at her in wonder. He kneels down next to the body and brushes his fingers against it. Black flakes come off on his fingertips and drift down to the wet rocks. He smells nothing but water and autumn leaves and dark earth, but when he brings his fingers to his mouth, he smells charcoal and something like burnt pork.

**This is also the first time Will has actually come in contact with one of the bodies. The rest of them he just saw; this one he can touch and smell. It’s real. It’s here. (Inasmuch as anything here is real.)**

“What are you doing?” Abigail pleads.

“Hannibal didn’t see any of the other ones,” Will murmurs. Cassie Boyle disappeared, truly. That he remembers, he is certain of. But he didn’t go back into the bathroom to look for Marissa Schurr. As for Dr. Sauvage, well. Hannibal might have lied.

But he promised not to lie.

But he might have lied, when he said that.

_You can’t trust Hannibal. You know what he is._

Will stands up. “Let’s go back to the house,” he says.

“Yes, please.” Abigail has already backed up quite a few feet.

“Don’t tell Hannibal about this,” Will says.

Abigail stares at him with wide, troubled eyes, and it occurs to Will that it might be a bad idea to tell Abigail to keep secrets, especially ones about dead bodies.

“Never mind,” he says. “You can tell Hannibal.”

But Abigail walks back to the house with stiff shoulders and a hunted hunch to her neck. She doesn’t speak as they knock the mud off their boots, strip off their hunting vests, and hang up their guns. She goes straight up to her room and shuts the door. Will follows her up, hovers next to the flimsy wooden barrier that separates them, and ends up drifting back downstairs again. He goes back to tying his flies.

\-----

Dinner is pork medallions, with prosciutto and garlic and wilted arugula, and roasted tomatoes and chevre and crusty French bread. Will thinks the Momotaro tomatoes taste like any other tomato, but any tomato tastes good when roasted and smeared with salty goat cheese across a hunk of toasted baguette. The pork almost pales by comparison, but Will compliments it anyway. Hannibal’s cooking is always good, and Will prefers to praise it when he knows it isn’t people.

**I thought the pork medallions were an entree-humain recipe, but apparently not. Anyway, the prosciutto is not people--prosciutto is cured, which Hannibal has not had time to do--but the pork medallions, of course, are. The tomato thing is just something I came up with to showcase the tomatoes. I love Momotaro tomatoes, btw, just because of their color.**

“Dr. Sauvage called,” Hannibal says. “He apologized again for the abrupt departure. He cannot say for certain when he will return, but he doubts it will be longer than a week from now.”

Will makes a noncommittal noise as he forks another bite of prosciutto and arugula into his mouth. The bitterness of the arugula pairs well with the salty richness of the prosciutto.

**Will has become the kind of person who pays attention to flavors.**

“Do you think you can wait a week, Will? Or shall we find another doctor to do your brain scan?”

“You’re the one who insisted I go to a doctor.” Will puts down his fork.

“And I’m afraid I must continue to insist.” Hannibal cuts a bite-sized piece off of his medallion. “But I can hardly drag you into a doctor’s office against your will, and you have already submitted to an exam by Dr. Sauvage. You may prefer to wait until he returns, or, if it is urgent, we may find another doctor.”

“We saw a body by the river,” Abigail blurts out.

The silence that rises from the table grasps Will by the throat. He puts his knife down too, before something untoward can happen. He has to force himself to raise his gaze to Hannibal, who’s looking at Abigail with his lips slightly parted and his eyebrows slightly raised, in a perfect expression of surprise.

**He may actually be surprised. He didn’t factor Abigail into his plans. Hannibal’s never thrown off his game, though.**

“When?” Hannibal asks. He’s still holding his knife and fork in his hands.

“This afternoon.” Abigail gulps. “We went hunting. I wanted venison,” she says, in a lower voice.

Hannibal looks at Will. “Why didn’t you tell me about this immediately?” His brow furrows. “What did you see?”

“It was burned.” Abigail’s voice trembles so that she sounds like a little girl. “Just--totally burned.”

Hannibal does not even acknowledge her; he keeps his eyes fixed on Will, awaiting confirmation.

**Whatever; not like she’s real.**

Will swallows. “Like Georgia.”

The furrow between Hannibal’s eyebrows deepens. “You should have called me. Where is your phone?”

Will slaps his pocket automatically, even as he knows it isn’t in there. He listened to that message from Jack this afternoon, and then--and then what? “I’m...not sure. Sorry.” He wouldn’t have brought it with him anyway. It might have frightened off the deer, and the woods are safe.

Hannibal settles back in his seat. After a moment of silent contemplation, he spears a forkful of prosciutto and arugula and brings it to his mouth.

“That’s it?” says Will.

“Not over dinner,” says Hannibal. “We will discuss this later.”

**He wouldn’t do that to the food.**

\-----

After dinner, after the dishwasher has been loaded and the wine glasses set out to dry, Will murmurs something to Hannibal like “Excuse me” or “Just a sec” and drifts up the stairs to Abigail’s room. Her door is closed; Will knocks, and Abigail’s voice replies, “Who is it?”

“It’s Will,” he says. “Can I come in?”

“Yeah.”

**Note that Abigail asks _Who is it_ rather than just telling the person to come in. Presumably if it were Hannibal, she’d tell him to go away; not that he’d listen.**

He enters and finds Abigail sitting on her bed, hugging a pillow to her chest. Her room is spare, compared to the sumptuousness of the bedroom that Will and Hannibal share, with its king-sized bed and thousand-count sheets, its fireplace, its Turkish rug. Abigail’s bedroom has wood paneling on the walls and a twin-sized bed, a desk with a rolling chair where she does her schoolwork, and a bookshelf of teen romance novels and Japanese manga.

**The Japanese manga was a whimsical little touch, since I’ve heard about the Lady Murasaki. But I also make a lot of jokes about how Hannibal was written by CLAMP, and anyway, Abigail seems like the kind of person who’d like Fruits Basket.**

“I’m sorry I told Hannibal,” she says as Will sits on the bed beside her.

“It’s okay,” he says. “I told you that you could.”

She rests her chin on the pillow, on her knees. “He doesn’t like me, you know.”

“That’s not true,” Will says, and even as the words leave his mouth he feels their falseness.

“It is,” she says. “I mean, he doesn’t _hate_ me. But I’m not special to him, not like you. The only reason I’m here at all is because of you. Otherwise he would have killed me.”

**I think this is true. Hannibal doesn’t hurt children, for the most part, but we’ve already seen that he wouldn’t hesitate to hurt Abigail in order to hurt Will. (And Abigail is on the edge of “child” anyway.)**

Will swallows. His palms turn clammy. He scrubs them on his jeans and braces his elbows on his knees. “I.” He looks down at his hands. “I’m sorry.”

“I’m not.” Abigail flings her legs out straight and sets the pillow aside. “I mean, I’m glad I’m alive. It’s just. I’m afraid of him, you know?”

**She’s practical.**

Will keeps looking at his hands. “I know. He’s frightening.”

He doesn’t need to look at her to know that she’s looking at him, head tilted sideways in that girlish way she has. “But you’re not afraid of him.”

“No.”

He waits for her to ask, Why not? But she doesn’t.

\-----

Will goes back downstairs to find Hannibal waiting for him in the living room, seated before the fireplace with a glass of port, the dogs sprawled around on the rug in varying stages of repose. Two fingers of whiskey and a cube of ice wait for Will on the end table between their chairs. Will sits and draws the glass toward him, but doesn’t take a sip just yet.

**Fireplaces everywhere, I guess. I originally had this scene take place in the dining room, but that didn’t seem right. I wanted something more intimate.**

“So,” Hannibal says.

Will swirls his drink around in his glass. “So.”

“You saw Georgia Madchen. In the woods.”

Will doesn’t raise his eyes. “She was by the river.” He takes a deep breath. “Burned to a crisp, as she was...before.” He takes a sip of the whiskey now, eyes fluttering shut at the burn.

Hannibal nods, as if this were expected. He raises his port to his lips. “You said, before, that whoever was doing this was sending you a message. That you could not run from your past. Was that the message you read today?”

Will jerks his head in something approximating a nod. He catches a glimpse of Hannibal out of the corner of his eye and holds it: not quite eye contact, but not quite looking away either. “But they’re running out of bodies.”

“Have you not received the message, then?”

“I’m not running from anything,” Will whispers.

“We are all running from something.” Hannibal regards his port in the firelight, dark and glittering like blood or rubies. “That has been true since the inception of life. Some of us run farther or faster than others, but for all of us there are truths about ourselves, our lives, that we would rather not face.”

**This, right fucking here, is the biggest hint I could possibly drop, and I had to work REALLY HARD to get it into a sentence that Hannibal would actually say. God.**

**I was a little concerned that someone who hadn’t seen the movie at all might be confused, but I think it’s explicable even if you haven’t seen the movie? I hope I included enough explanation at the end.**

Will stares into the flickering firelight, until it threatens to burn red into his eyes. “What did you say?”

Hannibal gives Will a dour look. “Were you not listening?”

“No, I was listening, I just…” Will takes a fumbling sip of his drink. “What was that word you used? Inception?”

Hannibal inclines his head.

“Why did you use that word?”

“It is just a word, Will. I chose it because it suited my purpose.”

“And what was your purpose?”

“To communicate with you.” Hannibal stands. 

**To send you a message, in other words.**

“I am going to bed. You may join me if you wish.”

Will watches the way the light refracts off of the cut crystal. “I’ll be up in a minute.”

He lets the dogs out for their before-bed bathroom break, then tosses the house in search of his missing phone. He finds it in a drawer in the living room, where he’s certain he didn’t leave it. He has no missed calls.

**It’s obvious by now that Hannibal is messing with Will’s phone, I hope.**

\-----

Hannibal opens his eyes when Will slides under the covers. His corneas glitter in the darkness, and his heat has warmed the blankets. He turns onto his side and curves his body toward Will.

“I’m worried about you,” he says.

Will closes his eyes. “Why?”

“You’re seeing things. That is cause for concern.”

“Abigail saw it too. That means it’s real, not just in my head.” Will licks his lips and tests the words behind his teeth before saying them out loud. “Did you lie to me, about Dr. Sauvage?”

“Why would I lie to you about that?”

“That’s not an answer.”

They fall into silence. Will turns onto his side, bends his knees, so that they match. His fingertips brush Hannibal’s.

“I’m worried that whatever is happening is causing you to no longer trust me.” Hannibal makes it sound like a confession.

**And Hannibal _still_ doesn’t answer the question.**

“I’ve never trusted you,” Will whispers.

Hannibal’s fingertips twitch against his. “Then why remain?”

Will swallows with a dry click of his throat. “Where would I go?”

\-----

Will opens his eyes in the middle of the night. He turns his head to look at Hannibal, a still, warm, lump underneath the covers, then to the other side to inspect the clock. It’s almost four in the morning. He slithers out of bed and pads downstairs in his bare feet. His phone is still in the end table. He has two missed calls, and two messages. They’re both from Jack.

_”I know Hannibal is here, but I can’t find him. Be careful, Will.”_

_”Don’t trust Hannibal. Don’t trust anything you see. Hannibal is here, and he’s dangerous.”_

Will deletes both messages. He stands in the middle of the living room for a few minutes, staring at nothing. The dogs are awake and watching him, and Buffy is wagging her tail tentatively, but they don’t move from their beds. Will goes into the kitchen and gets down the jar of dried liver treats. The dogs hear the jar and prick their ears, and as a pack they rise to crowd the entrance to the kitchen without ever once setting a paw onto the tile. Will gives them each a treat and pats each dog on the head. Then he ascends the stairs again. The dogs stay, ears pricked. Mal whines.

**One last treat for the dogs. Will knows that they’re not real, knows that this is coming to an end, but he still wants to treat them as if they’re real.**

“Shh,” says Will.

Instead of turning at the second landing to go to the bedroom, Will continues up to the third floor. He’s never been up there, at Hannibal’s request: “I would like for there to be something that is mine alone,” Hannibal said. “Grant me that, at least.”

There’s only one door at the top of the stairs. Will places his hand on the knob. It turns easily under his hand, and the door swings open without a sound.

It’s cold, and Will can’t see. He fumbles for a light switch, finds it, and white light pours down from humming fluorescents overhead. His breath hangs in front of his face, and plastic rustles under his curled toes. The door swings shut behind Will with a metallic click.

The room is small; the ceiling slants at one end where the roof slopes, making it appear even smaller. There are no windows. The walls are thick and insulated metal, and somewhere Will can hear the sound of a fan, pushing more cold air against his skin, his t-shirt and pyjama pants offering little protection. And in the middle of it all is a body, hanging naked by his ankles from the ceiling, his wrists tied together and hanging almost to the floor.

**I looked at a lot of photos of meat lockers. Did you know there are portable ones?**

Will knows it’s Hannibal, even though one of his cheeks has been carved away, exposing his teeth in a perpetual grimace on that side. The fluorescent light is not flattering, but it allows Will to see the missing dorsal muscle from alongside his spine ( _pork medallions_ ), the large piece of thigh and buttock carved away ( _breakfast sausage_ ). The torso has been cracked open ( _duck breast_ ) and emptied of its organs ( _god knows_ ). A cart next to the body contains all the butcher’s tools, neatly laid out: large knives for hacking and separating joints, smaller knives for carving and trimming. A long metal counter is mounted against one wall, with a deep sink and sprayer, an electric bone saw, and a device Will is certain is used for vacuum-packing the meat: he can see the small plastic packages lined up on a shelf nearby, and a standing rack of ribs.

**Being dry-aged, although I’m not sure what plan Hannibal had for them. Prime rib?**

**This was research that made me worry the NSA was going to break down my door, by the way; I had to know what part of the human body would most resemble pork medallions. The corresponding muscle on humans would be, well, the loin, which is sort of above the hip, you know, where a loincloth sits, but I went with the dorsal muscle on the recommendation of a random forum. Yes, there are forums where people intellectually discuss what parts of the human body would be good to eat. I love those guys.**

**This was planned from the beginning, though. Like, once I knew that the real Hannibal was going to kill the fake Hannibal and take his place, I knew that they would eat the fake Hannibal. And, again, imagine what that was like for Hannibal: to kill someone with his own face, and then carefully dismember and eat him? I can’t even.**

Bile rises in his throat. He stumbles backward, hitting the door, and scrabbles blindly at it for a minute before finding the latch that lets him stumble out. The strength leaves his knees and he drops down to sit with his head between his knees on the second-to-top step, every molecule in his body shaking. He can’t see, or rather, all he sees is Hannibal’s face, one half of it in repose, as if sleeping, the other half with its teeth and gums exposed. He closes his eyes and sees the ribs, red streaked with white, harsh in the buzzing blue-white fluorescent light. He vomits up a thin yellow bile. It stinks and burns the back of his throat.

**I love writing about people puking. I don’t know why. I think stress vomiting doesn’t get enough attention in fiction.**

He hears Abigail scream.

Will is on his feet and pounding down the stairs before he even knows what he’s doing. He pauses at the second floor landing, and Abigail screams again, below. He takes the rest of the stairs two at a time and skips the last two entirely to land on the floor with his knees bent.

The dogs are barking. Buster is howling. Will shoves past them and into the kitchen, where Hannibal has Abigail with one arm across her chest and neck. The other holds a knife with a wooden handle and a sharp, hooked blade. 

**There’s your linoleum knife. I’ll have you know Facebook keeps showing me ads for linoleum knives, now.**

Abigail is sobbing, her face blotchy and streaked with tears. Will grinds to a halt and holds up his hands.

“No,” he says, and hates how pleading it comes out. “No, Hannibal, don’t do this.”

“She’s not real,” Hannibal says. “This is a dream.”

“No.” Will feels the muscles around his eyes and mouth contort despite himself. “No, it’s not, she’s real, she’s _real_.”

“ _I_ am real,” says Hannibal. “You and I, we are real. You saw me up there, did you not? Hanging like a side of beef. And yet here I am. What do you believe?”

**I’m a little worried, BTW, that some readers wouldn’t figure out what happened here, which is to say, that the real Hannibal broke into Will’s dream, killed the fake Hannibal, and since then they’ve been eating him. But I guess even if the reader doesn’t realize that’s what happened, it’s still pretty weird and fucked up.**

“No.” Will brings his hands toward the sides of his face, as if like a child he can deny things simply by not hearing them.

“You must wake up,” Hannibal urges. Somehow in the midst of the barking dogs and Abigail’s wails he sounds as calm and collected as he had in his office, during their conversations. Will still responds to it, feels Hannibal’s voice take him by the ankles and anchor him to reality.

He shakes his head. “No, no, no--”

Hannibal gives one graceful, shrugging motion and tears the knife across Abigail’s throat. Blood sprays out across the granite counters, the cherry wood cabinets, the tile floor. A cry tears itself from Will’s throat, maybe “No!” or maybe just a wordless scream, and Will crashes to his knees to press his hand against Abigail’s throat. He knows how to do it now, how to stem the bleeding, not like the last time--the first time, in the Hobbs’ kitchen. Hannibal stands back and watches, blood still dripping from his knife, while Abigail gives a bubbling gasp. Will needs to call 911--or whatever passes for 911 in this godforsaken country--but the phone is miles away and Hannibal is hardly going to help. He feels the futility of his actions bubble against his fingers, and he squeezes his eyes shut against the congestion that’s begun to drip out of his nose, onto his stupid, helpless hands.

“Give it up, Will,” Hannibal suggests. “She is already dead.”

**After I finished the first draft, I thought about going back and changing this, mostly because I wanted Hannibal to get his suit wet. That river that I keep mentioning, out back? That’s there because I had this grand vision of Will trying to run from Hannibal and Hannibal having to chase Will into the river and getting his suit wet. It ended up not happening, but I tried it anyway; rather than having Abigail scream and Will run downstairs to find her already being held captive, I had Will get her up in the middle of the night, and they attempted to flee into the countryside. I--and Will--quickly realized how futile this was; they had inadequate supplies, and honestly, where did Will think he was going to hide that Hannibal wouldn’t find him? The wilderness out there isn’t even complete; Will only constructed a few acres, because he didn’t think he’d need more than a few acres, and after a while they’re just going in circles. It also radically changed how Abigail died--not to mention made her aware that she was a dream figment--and raised the very real possibility that Will might kill her himself, just to prevent Hannibal from killing her.**

**Too much. It also raised the real possibility that Hannibal might get killed, because in his pursuit of Will into the countryside the Jack Crawford “security system” is finally able to spot him, resulting in dozens of Jack Crawfords descending on Will’s dream. Hannibal’s good, but not that good, and he’d get killed/ejected from the dream. Sure, he’d come back, but then it’d take another 12,000 words for him to get Will into this position again, and finally kill him. Nope. So I compromised and had the ending--the gutting/waking up--take place in the river, so that Hannibal could still get somewhat wet. (I originally had the token hidden somewhere inside the house.)**

“No, she’s not,” Will barks, his chest heaving. He can feel Abigail moving under him, trying to draw breath despite choking on her own blood. Her eyes are still open, staring up at him, past him, at the golden halo of the kitchen light.

“She is.” Hannibal says this gently, so gently. “This is a dream, Will. You are dreaming. Let her go.”

Abigail gives one last sigh and relaxes under Will’s body, as if sinking into the floor. Her eyes are still half-open. Her eyelashes are so dark; her eyes are so blue. Will sits back onto his heels. His hands are covered with blood. It’s pooled all over the floor, soaking into Will’s plaid pyjama pants and lapping against the soles of Hannibal’s leather shoes. Hannibal is dressed as if he’s about to start dinner, sleeves rolled up to below his elbows, now all streaked with blood.

“You promised,” Will whispers. His voice cracks on the second syllable.

Hannibal seems almost offended. “I made no such promise. _You_ made that promise, with a creature of your own devising.”

**Sometimes I write an entire story just to get to one line, and by the time I get there the line isn’t even the same anymore. This is one of those lines; the original version was something like, “You made that promise with the monster inside yourself,” but by the time I got there it no longer seemed like something Hannibal would say. I tinkered with it for ages, trying to make it say what I wanted it to say, while at the same time making it something _Hannibal_ would say. Unfortunately Hannibal doesn’t actually talk like a real person, so I ended up with this cryptic statement.**

**One of my betas interpreted the line to mean that Hannibal was jealous of the fake Hannibal, which is not the case at all; he would no more be jealous of a figment of someone’s imagination than he’d be jealous of the wind. Rather, what Hannibal’s saying here is that Will made that promise _literally with himself_ \--with the killer inside himself, that is. Hence Will’s reaction in the next line:**

“ _A creature that you left there!_ ” Will roars, and now he glares up at Hannibal. He can’t stand to be on the floor anymore and gets to his feet.

Hannibal’s pause is nothing if not deliberate. “I tried. But I could not have awakened anything that was not already there, Will. You know that. I fed the caterpillar; I whispered through its chrysalis. But what’s emerged has followed its own nature.”

**That’s from the TV show, as you probably recognized. Also from the books, I guess.**

Will lets his hands curl into fists. The blood is already beginning to dry, sticky against his palms.

“And it ran away to live in a dream, sleep in a machine.” Hannibal takes a step toward Will. “Wake up, Will. Please.”

“Why won’t you leave me alone.” Will looks away, at the wall. There are no windows in the kitchen, but if he could see through this wall then he would see out the living room window, where the streets of Paris are crumbling away. Paris was always the weakest part of this world; he hired an architecture student at Georgetown to construct it, who’d just returned from a study abroad. Will has never even been out of the country.

The dogs have stopped barking.

**Goodbye, doggies. :(**

“I want you back with me,” Hannibal says

Will presses the heels of his hands against his eyes, not caring that he’s smearing blood across his own face. “We’re not together, we’re not even--you’re in a different country or something, I don’t even know where you _are_.”

“But at least we share the same reality.”

Will lets his hands drop. “Stay here, then. With me. Stay here, it’s, everything here is what you wanted. You, me, Abigail.” He gestures to the still, blank-eyed figure on the floor. “A place in the world for us. Together.”

Hannibal sighs. He runs his fingers across the granite countertop, leaving a streak of rusty red. “I cannot say that I have not been tempted,” he admits. “You have...done admirable work. There is much to admire here. But there would be no meaning to our lives, no purpose to anything we do. And the food is terrible.”

Will stares. “You can’t mean that.”

“I do mean it.” Hannibal wipes the blood off his knife with a corner of his apron.

“You don’t like it here--” Will’s voice cracks, “--because the _food is bad?_ Hannibal, the food here is amazing. Every meal is like a, a symphony.”

“That is precisely what I mean.” Hannibal tucks the knife into a pocket. “Every meal is perfect, until perfection itself ceases to have any meaning.”

“So you don’t like it here,” Will’s voice rises with each word, until he’s shouting, “because it’s too perfect.”

“Perfection must be earned if it is to have any value.” Hannibal steps forward and traces his fingertips along Will’s jaw, until he’s cupping Will’s face. His hand is warm and smells like blood. “You deserve better than this.”

**Conversations between Will and Hannibal are _very_ hard to write. First of all, Hannibal doesn’t talk like a normal human being, and second, their conversations are very volatile. They can go any number of ways, and everything has multiple meanings. This conversation was one that actually came together very easily, which is good because I was near the end of the story and becoming fatigued. Writing Hannibal fanfiction is intense, you guys.**

Will’s skin shivers. “Please don’t.”

“Where did you hide it, Will?” Hannibal sounds so kind.

Will closes his eyes. “Don’t. Don’t ask me things.”

“Tell me. Where is your token?”

Will presses his lips together, but he still trembles.

Hannibal’s hand tightens, just briefly, but that is enough. “I can kill you now, wake you that way. But if you wake without your token, you will never be certain that you are not still dreaming. You will spend the rest of your life seeking to wake up. I don’t wish that for you.”

Will licks his lips. “Then what do you wish for me?”

**I want you to know that it drives me bananas that so many paragraphs start with “Will” here. I try to vary it so that paragraphs don’t start with the same word or name too many times in the row, unless I’m doing it deliberately for effect. In this case it wasn’t for effect--although the effect is not bad--it was just because for reasons having to do with rhythm and what have you, it just didn’t work any other way. Bah.**

“Only the best.” Hannibal strokes his thumb over Will’s cheekbone. “Please, Will.”

“All right.” Will opens his eyes. Abigail has vanished from the floor, leaving behind only a pool of cooling blood. “All right.”

Hannibal follows Will out the back door. A pink band stripes the horizon, orange and yellow at the edges. Will’s feet are still bare; pebbles sting the soles of his feet, and dirt embeds itself in the creases between his toes. The tall grass pricks him through the thin material of his pyjamas. Hannibal follows a step and a half behind. Behind them, the house crumbles and dissolves, as if swept away by a god’s angry hand.

They come to the river. Will wades right in, the water swirling and pushing around him, tugging at his clothes. He keeps going until the water is up to his hips, and then he bends down, pushing away rock after rock after rock. In the real world it would have washed away, or he would have been looking in the wrong place. But this is not the real world, and after a minute Will comes up with a bedraggled trout fishing lure. It bristles with bright red feathers and a few brown strands of hair; a wicked black fish hook protrudes from the other end.

**The fishing lure token was the OP’s idea and I liked it, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it into a proper token, because the token needs to be able to do something. I thought about having it float or sink, but that would require Will to have or be near water to use his token, which seemed impractical. I thought that maybe he should just stab himself with a fish hook--I liked the self-destructive mental image--and a friend seconded it, so I went with it. Later it occurred to me that there was a certain symmetry with Hannibal’s linoleum knife token, and that was nice too.**

Will digs the barb into his thumb. Nothing happens. It will not penetrate the flesh. He tries again, stabbing it into his palm, into the fleshy base of his thumb, the back of his hand. Nothing. His face crumples, but the tears will not come. He turns around and Hannibal is there. His hair is disheveled and his shirt is rumpled, and with the knife in his hand, he looks very much like he did their last night in Baltimore. The water parts around them on its way down the river. 

“What’s yours?” Will asks.

Hannibal holds out the short, curved knife. He holds out his other hand and stabs the knife straight through. But when he draws back the knife, his hand is whole. He turns his hand for Will to see the unmarred palm.

“You see,” says Hannibal.

**You see? We’re the same after all.**

Will gives a slow, languid blink. He looks up at Hannibal. Hannibal looks at him expectantly.

“Do it, then,” Will says. “Wake me up.”

Hannibal nods and embraces Will with one arm around his shoulders. Will nestles his face into Hannibal’s shoulder and twines his arms around Hannibal’s back.

It doesn’t hurt that much, after all. Will lets out a gasp; he can hear himself spilling into the river. Hannibal makes a soothing noise, perhaps a “shhh,” but Will can no longer hear it. He clutches at Hannibal’s shoulders, and Hannibal holds him and doesn’t let him fall.

And then he wakes up.

\---end---

**THE END. Well, I hope that was somewhat interesting for you. It was interesting for me, in the sense that while I knew what Hannibal was doing the whole time, I didn’t really examine what he was thinking or feeling. Now I have, and boy, he's crazy.**

**I have a rule, BTW, against engaging with readers about certain aspects of my writing. It's a holdover from my workshop days, when the instructor literally would not let us reply to people's critiques, the idea being that once your work is published, you no longer have any control over it. If your reader hates it, or doesn't get it, oh well! I still believe this to be true--that stories belong to their readers--and that's why, in the past, I have not really engaged with readers about my work (other than thanking everyone for their lovely comments, of course). My stance on this may change in the future, but that's what it is for now--but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy sometimes tearing off the veil and showing the inner workings, because 1. it's interesting to _me_ and 2. it's fun to come back years later and see what kind of work I put into a story. Wow, Past Me! Way to go, Past Me!**

**Thanks for reading, everybody! I hope you enjoyed yourselves.**

**Author's Note:**

> [coloredink.tumblr.com](http://coloredink.tumblr.com/)
> 
> [sumiwrites.wordpress.com](https://sumiwrites.wordpress.com/) (if you wanna see the books I've written)


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